"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interrogative form of the sentence give it vividness? Contrast the effect of saying, "Who would willingly linger on the hideous details?" with "No one would willingly linger", etc. The author does not expect an answer, he throws the sentence into the question form for the rhetorical effect. The reader pays more attention to the thought by trying to find ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the case—as though it were a new barrier set up between them and their fellow-creatures (here Miss Trix blushed slightly, and had recourse to her smelling-bottle). "You," said the curate, waxing rhetorical as he addressed an imaginary, but bloated, capitalist, "have no more right to your money than I have. It is intrusted to you to be shared with me." At this point I heard Lady Queenborough sniff and Algy Stanton snigger. I stole a glance at Trix and detected a slight waver ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... to these are other faults of still graver import. In his earlier plays, the Poet's style is often, not to say generally, at least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly dramatic. The persons often lay themselves out in what may not unfairly be called speech-making. Their use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the twentieth century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute. This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... were: (1) Speaking in court on behalf of a client; (2) Writing speeches for a client to deliver; (3) Teaching pupils; (4) Giving public displays of his skill. There is a doubtful statement that Lucian failed in (1), and took to (2) in default. His surviving rhetorical pieces (The Tyrannicide, The Disinherited, Phalaris) are declamations on hypothetical cases which might serve either for (3) or (4); and The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas, and perhaps Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... process went even farther than secretiveness in its reaction from the large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism. There arose even a repudiation of 'principles' of action, and a type of worker which proclaimed itself 'Opportunist-Socialist.' This conception of indifference to the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Preface, Mr Stevens informs the reader, that he had reduced the work to considerably less size than the Spanish original, yet without omitting any part of the history, or even abridging any material circumstances; having cut off long speeches, which were only added by the author as rhetorical flourishes, and omitted many tedious lists of the names of officers who were present at the principal actions, and extended reflections of the author which were only useful to increase the size of the work. In this account of the work by the translator, the Spanish is mentioned as the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... But while I thus thought such a protest to be based upon truth, and to be a religious duty, and a rule of Anglicanism, and a necessity of the case, I did not at all like the work. Hurrell Froude attacked me for doing it; and, besides, I felt that my language had a vulgar and rhetorical look about it. I believed, and really measured, my words, when I used them; but I knew that I had a temptation, on the other hand, to say against Rome as much as ever I could, in order to protect myself ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... all went well, but from the very beginning of the visit he observed, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country was thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetorical resolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutional horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway from one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, the Swedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of frenzied discussion, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... had emptied all her vials, and that I was nerved, because there was nothing more to dread. But the worst is always behind, and this is the irony of fate. You think that merely a rhetorical metaphor, a tragic trope? How should you know? That Christmas card is the solitary dove I sent out to hunt a resting-place for mother and for me, when the flood engulfed us. It was my design sent to Boston, to compete for the prizes offered. How I dreamed, how I toiled! ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of a practical turn of mind, was always uncomfortable when Rita spread her rhetorical wings. He did not see why she could not speak plain English. But he kissed her affectionately, heartily glad that he could leave her content with her surroundings; and with a cordial farewell to the good people of the house, he rode away, followed by his clanking orderlies, leading the horse ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... reference to the heavens is a trifle over-rhetorical. Santos-Dumont differed from all aviators (or pilots of airplanes) and most navigators of dirigibles in always advocating the strategy of staying near the ground. In his flights he barely topped the roofs of the houses, and in his writings he repeatedly refers to the sense of safety that came to ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the civilized world had had lessons enough, ever since that seventh century burning of the Alexandrian library by the Caliph Omar, with that famous but apocryphal rhetorical dilemma, put in his mouth perhaps by some nimble-witted reporter:—"If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless, and should be burned: if not, they are pernicious, and must not be spared." But the heedless world goes carelessly on, deaf to the voice of reason, and the lessons of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... offered me the sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Pendleton, the permanent chairman, delivered a rhetorical State rights speech, in which he said: "The Democratic party has always maintained the rights of the States as essential to the maintenance ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... against him when he stood up and accused the great Dr. Johnson of having made criticism 'a kind of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation'. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... weep; and the Clintonians weakened daily. Had not many years of trouble and anxiety made their emotions peculiarly susceptible, Hamilton would have attempted their agitation more sparingly; and had he been theatrical and rhetorical in his methods, he would have lost his control of them long before the end of the session. But he rarely indulged in a trope or a flight, never in bathos nor in bursts of ill-balanced appeal. Nothing ever was drier than the subjects he elucidated day after ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... continued in a slightly rhetorical vein—the Secretary was above all things first, last, and always ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... DEAR MEMBER—I send you a powerful petition, For absolute, instant, entire abolition. This question our Chamber is taking a lead in Composed, as you know, of the Flowers of Dunedin, Intelligent Druggists, rhetorical Quakers, Broad acres—a few—but no want of wiseacres. All are perfectly clear that these horrid restrictions Are the proximate cause of our present afflictions, Obstructing the bowels, as 'twere, of the nation, And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... like one of my father's—so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)—that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet more formidable figure of speech called ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lost his temper (never very securely held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to submit himself to his ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... follows is a fine example of elevated and impassioned oratory. Judge Story here lauds the American Republic, and employs to advantage the rhetorical figures ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... now passed away, and contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. Further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. But there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... witnessed unmoved. She might have been deaf, dumb, without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went. Yet oft when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of "Almayer's Folly," and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts, squatted wearily on her heels with her back against the leg of the table, Nina would approach her curiously, guarding her skirts from betel juice besprinkling the floor, and gaze down upon her as one might look into the quiescent crater of a volcano after a destructive eruption. Mrs. Almayer's ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... the original Introduction to the contemplated Apology, concerning which we read in the prefatory remarks to the so-called Torgau Articles mentioned above: "To this end [of justifying the Elector's peaceable frame of mind] it will be advantageous to begin [the projected Apology] with a lengthy rhetorical introduction." (68; C. R., 26, 171.) This introduction, later on replaced by another, was composed by Melanchthon at Coburg and polished by him during the first days at Augsburg. May 4 he remarks in a letter to Luther: "I have shaped the Exordium ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... contributed to the skill and impressiveness with which, in nearly every oration, he appeals to the events of the past, and sums up the lessons of history. Whether he came personally under the influence either of Plato, the philosopher, or of Isocrates, the greatest rhetorical teacher of his time, and a political pamphleteer of high principles but little practical insight, is much more doubtful. The two men were almost as different in temperament and aims as it was possible to be, but Demosthenes' familiarity with ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious prejudices of their country... In the eighth century an ignorant pope had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, accused of having proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth. The greatest genius that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... best of opportunities, and is a writer of rare taste and rhetorical force, and an eloquent and impressive speaker. As a preacher he is never speculative and theoretical, never dogmatic nor sectarian, but eminently spiritual and practical. But the strongest point in his character ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... king quite as much as the former one had done. The allusion to the contingency of a mule's reigning in Media he very naturally regarded as only a rhetorical and mystical mode of expressing an utter impossibility. Croesus considered himself and the continuance of his power as perfectly secure. He was fully confirmed in his determination to organize his expedition without any delay, and to proceed immediately to the proper ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... half of a smooth, beardless face, and an affable yet satirical mouth. The speaker cleared his throat with the slight preparatory cough of the practiced orator, and, approaching the window, to Key's intense surprise, actually began in the identical professional and rhetorical style previously indicated by ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... the prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to gain the prize ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... with a Harangue, wherein he cannot have given me a greater Opinion of his Parts, then he has given me Distrust for his Hypothesis, since for it even a Man of such Learning can bring no better Arguments. The Rhetorical part of his Discourse, though it make not the least part of it, I shall say nothing to, designing to examine only the Argumentative part, and leaving it to Philoponus to answer those passages wherein either Paracelsus or Chymists are concern'd: ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey this division of labour has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything—look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else—he ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... establishing some truth by way of illustration. Some sophists endeavour to apply, on feigned topics, avast heap and flow of words, others to impose upon you with false conclusions. As to the orators, some with their rhetorical harangues employ all the powers of persuasion, taking care to observe the precepts of art, and to omit nothing opposite to the subject. The boys of different schools wrangle with one another in verse; contending about the principles of Grammar, or the rules of the Perfect Tenses ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... pursuit. These inquiries were not, however, conducted by the Sophists with the best motives. They were not always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an earnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for mere effect—to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical power. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as Cicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal effect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties, maintaining paradoxes, and passing off mere tricks of oratory for ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... A rhetorical half-truth of this kind, as applied to the entire people, can best be answered in the manner of the modern realists. The field is narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing the taste for sensation, will be content ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... encouragement and spread of the highest forms of national culture. To what use could a gentleman of Edward III's or Richard II's day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of Oxenford" in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in which he lives, though a dependent on its charity ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the same paragraph to almost every paper, we sometimes pick up a very decent day's work. Now and then the muse is unkind, or the day uncommonly quiet, and then we rather starve; and sometimes the unconscionable editors will clip our paragraphs when they are a little too rhetorical, and snip off twopence or threepence at a go. I have many a time had my pot of porter snipped off of my dinner in this way; and have had to dine with dry lips. However, I cannot complain. I rose gradually in the lower ranks of the craft, and am now, I think, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... The inversion of reference in these lines is an illustration of the rhetorical figure 'chiasmus.' Cp. the arrangement of the demonstrative pronouns in these sentences from 'Kenilworth':—'Your eyes contradict your tongue. That speaks of a protector, willing and able to watch over you; but these ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... even more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet—hnn!" He was about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from a side window upon the twins ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... wholly devoid of truth; he called his works Commissiones meras, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings Arenu sine Calce, "sand without ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... to grow dependent on the industry, goodwill, and intercourse of other nations, and that we should endeavor to hark back to an earlier economic state of national independence? Well, there are even in Britain rhetorical politicians who speak of the necessity of retaining all "key" or "essential" industries within their national control—who propose to reverse the tide of social evolution by some flimsy apparatus of tariffs and subsidies. This is impossible. The war has left the European peoples, one ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... dart at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me about the equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac's monument to Mrs. Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,—poor conceits both of them, without the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from feeling that we are standing by the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The English Orator, or Rhetorical Descents by way of declamation upon some notable Themes, both Historical and Philosophical, ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... better than Pope could have written; for though he does not go out of himself by the force of imagination, he goes out of himself by the force of common-places and rhetorical dialogue. On the other hand, they are not so good as Shakspeare's; but he has left the best character of Shakspeare that has ever been ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... a son of the eighteenth century; he began as a didactic and patriotic poet, and might at first be considered a follower of Jakob Cats. He became principally a lyric poet, but his lyric knew no deep sentiment, no suppressed feeling; its greatness lay in its rhetorical power. His ode to Napoleon may therefore be one of the best to characterize his genius. When he returned to his native country after eleven years' exile, with heart and mind full of Holland, it was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Full Exposition of the Principles of Rhetorical Reading; with Numerous Exercises for Practice, both in Prose and Poetry, Various in Style, and carefully adapted to the Purposes of Teaching in Schools of Every Grade. By Charles W. Sanders, A.M. New York. Ivison, Phinney, & ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reaching the cave, and meanwhile Sturges restored the lost illusions of Pilar. Not only did he make love to her without any of the rhetorical nonsense of the caballero, but he was big and strong, and it was evident that he was afraid of nothing, not even of Dona Brigida. The dreams of her silent girlhood swirled in her imagination, but ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Lydia Bell, a talented elocutionist of Lincoln, devoted some months to lecturing. Her great intellectual and rhetorical gifts made her a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... of the game, which follows the introduction, requires little rhetorical skill. Each play is described in its proper place and order and should be so clear that a reader could make a diagram of the game from it. It must also be accurate in names and distances ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... good specimen of the rhetorical school of writing popular in Spanish newspapers; but all that is written is not gospel. From personal observation it was evident to me that these Republicans of the Spanish towns of the north were not so scrupulous in ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... language was one which had to be made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might, we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the 'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same Skelton thought ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... tend against some one. Wherefore just as discord denotes a contrariety of wills, so contention signifies contrariety of speech. For this reason when a man contrasts various contrary things in a speech, this is called contentio, which Tully calls one of the rhetorical colors (De Rhet. ad Heren. iv), where he says that "it consists in developing a speech from contrary things," for instance: "Adulation has a pleasant beginning, and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... distinction of birth or accomplishment. His work is mainly after the Italian model. The Laberinto de fortuna, by which he is best known, is a dull allegory with much of Dante's apparatus. There are historical passages where the poet's patriotism leads him page xvii to a certain rhetorical height, but his good intentions are weighed down by three millstones: slavish imitation, the monotonous arte mayor stanza and the deadly earnestness of his temperament. He enjoyed great renown ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... than for its inculcation of a high morality,—the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... vital spark which alone bestows enduring life. He failed wholly to guess that these books had in them the elements of the universal and the permanent—just as he was unable to perceive that the more obviously literary, rhetorical, academic works he was ready enough to commend highly, lacked these elements and therefore were doomed soon to sink ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... gives them convincing power. They derive their cogency from a favouring atmosphere of opinion or feeling. Two features of recent controversy suffice of themselves (if proof were needed) to establish the truth of this assertion. The rhetorical emphasis laid by Home Rulers on the baseness of the arts which carried the Act of Union is, as an argument in favour of repealing the Act, little else than irrational. The assumed infamy of Pitt does not prove the alleged wisdom of Gladstone; and to urge the repeal of an Act which ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... This rhetorical question, in fact, was not necessary, as we all, hearing the word "Proletariat" in the middle of Khokhriakov's speech had already started to make a noise and to applaud, the cheers densely hung in the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... steady faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist paper published in Geneva. L'Anarchista, I believe it was called. I glanced at it. It was in Italian, naive, simple, rather rhetorical. So they ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation: three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect. In the remainder of the way I advanced with a more equal ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, though The Rape of the Lock is as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticism—what a regiment of witty lines to be written ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... a plea for picturesque treatment of biography and of history; not by gaudy coloring and violent contrasts, striving after rhetorical effect, but in the observance of proportion, of grouping, of subordination to a central idea; not content with mere narration, however accurate in details. A narrative which fails in portrayal, in picturesque impression, is not accurate; and a biography which ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs. Channing's face of sorrow and distress ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... unavoidable priggishness...." I do not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin with clumsiness, there ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical figures, as is abundantly proved by ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... followers came to be regarded as a superfluous enthusiasm. And it is this same misconception of the fundamental principle of all Kingdoms that has deprived modern Christianity of its vitality. The failure to regard the exclusive claims of Christ as more than accidental, rhetorical, or ideal; the failure to discern the essential difference between His Kingdom and all other systems based on the lines of natural religion, and therefore merely Organic; in a word, the general neglect of the claims of Christ as the Founder of a new and higher Kingdom—these ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... generally so severe that not a clause and hardly a word could be changed or misplaced without danger, and the merit of his work was rather in the strength and beauty of the demonstration as a whole, than in the rhetorical grace or effect of its several parts. I speak of his great arguments. In his letters he sometimes showed a skill in harmony rarely surpassed. His letter to the executor of Mr. Wickham is delicately ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... Seminar. The topics discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal rhetoric in the secondary school ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... they must be play-actors to be happy and therefore to be efficient; and if I were Lord of Germany, and desired to lead my nation and to be loved by them, I should put great golden feathers on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, spout monologues in public, organize wide cavalry charges at reviews, and move through life generally to the crashing of an orchestra. For by doing this even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled in stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could become ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... It is that Sage's vindication from several malignant charges,—amongst others, and principally indeed, that of being much too refined and effeminate for a philosopher. Nothing can exceed the rhetorical skill with which he excuses himself for using—tooth-powder. 'Ought a philosopher,' he exclaims, 'to allow anything unclean about him, especially in the mouth,—the mouth, which is the vestibule of the soul, the gate of discourse, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mathematics or mathematical philosophy; nevertheless, without bringing attention to these very simple mathematical ideas we should not be able to proceed any further than in the past. Our life problems have always been "solved" by verbalists and rhetorical metaphysicians who cleverly played with vague words and who always ignored the supremely important matter of dimensions because they were ignorant of it. There was no possible way to arrive at an agreement on the significance ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... of the awakening of divine grace in the human heart, as actual proof that wistful mortality is inherently endowed with immortality, had electrified this symposium. Though it was fashionable, so to speak, in this remote cove among the Great Smoky Mountains, to be repentant in rhetorical involutions and a self-accuser in finespun interpretations of sin, doubt, or more properly an eager questioning, a desire to possess the sacred mysteries of religion, was unprecedented. Kennedy was a proud man, reticent, ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... no doubt, however, that Buchanan made out the case against the Queen with all the rhetorical force of which he was capable; that the accusation was bitter, as of a man who had been personally deceived and injured, as indeed it is quite possible that he may have felt himself to be; and that there ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove. "And now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate trifles! A sex of invalids. It is we who have become ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... recollect that your reasoning powers are almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we don't do any ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Smith's historic art, his lax criticism, his superficial acquaintance with foreign countries, his occasional proneness to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of rhetorical effect, his aversion for spiritual things, are all covered by one transcendent merit, which, in a man of so much ability, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of our extant Anglo-Saxon literature with a name so eminent. In 1835 the Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the Paris manuscript was first printed at Oxford, and as this book gives a hundred of the Psalms in vernacular poetry, the suggestion that they might be Aldhelm's, though modernised, had rhetorical attractions for the editor (Thorpe), and supplied him with material for a few rather idle sentences of his Latin preface. In 1840 Jacob Grimm edited (from Thorpe's editio princeps) two poems of the Vercelli book, the "Andreas" ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... to the jealousy of the manufacturing interest, and the principle of local government to that of centralisation. The reasonings as to matters of fact and business which make up the great bulk of these speeches are quite outside of our range, which can only deal with that which is more popular and rhetorical. Two specimens in the latter style I venture to quote—one of them appearing an excellent example of the genial humour he knew so well how to throw around the driest of arguments; the other a highly coloured view of the history and position of Liverpool in the commercial world, and of the danger ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... second historic play which can be wholly ascribed to Shakespeare we still find the poetic or rhetorical duality for the most part in excess of the dramatic; but in King Richard III. the bonds of rhyme at least are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare's plays belongs absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master, and that influence alone, is perceptible ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... the room was distinctly audible as he ended his paragraph with a rhetorical pause. He caught the sound on the instant and understood its meaning as the orator, holding his audience in breathless intensity, allows them to drop suddenly that he may appreciate his control of their feelings. Their pent-up energies give way to an abrupt relaxation followed ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... commonplace, one of the National Guard types of men, all that savoured most of the provision-shop and the cotton night-cap! And laying his hand on his heart, the Bohemian gave utterance to the rhetorical phrases: ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... passed against Mytilene; and when the question was brought forward again, he made a vehement harangue, the substance of which has been preserved by Thucydides. In this speech he appears as a practised rhetorical bravo, whose one object is to vilify his opponents, and throw contempt on their arguments, by an unscrupulous use of the weapons of ridicule, calumny, and invective. He reproaches the magistrates for convening a second assembly, in a matter which had already been decided; and ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... nature with scrupulous fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art—men like William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston—we may turn to that other group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the later Winslow Homer who certainly ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... point out the exquisite beauty of the imagery or the pathos and peace that breathe in the majestic rhythm of the words. There is something more than poetical beauty or rhetorical amplification of a single thought in those three clauses. The 'hiding-place' and 'covert' refer to one class of wants; the 'rivers of water in a dry place' to yet another; and 'the shadow of a great rock in a weary land' to yet a third. And, though they are tinged and dyed in Eastern imagery, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... of mechanism, the reply to her rhetorical question came down to her from heaven. It came in the shape of a thunder-roll that began far off and reverberated from mountain to mountain; then muttered itself into silence in the more distant hills. The Mistress, like ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... attitude, so long as it was maintained, was felt as a reproach by the government. At last, four were carried down to Westminster Abbey, to hear the Bishop of Durham deliver his famous sermon against the pope; and when this rhetorical inanity had also failed, and as they were thought to confirm one another in their obstinacy, they were dispersed among other houses the temper of which could be depended upon. Some were sent to the north; others to Sion, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims of respective "Kulturs" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the barbarian can have a ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... feeling, and eloquent; the production of a man acquainted with society, who has looked closely upon its various classes, and has the power of reading the signs of the times. He has a truthful vigor of description, a rhetorical rather than a dramatic power; or he sacrifices the latter to his habit of expressing his opinions in dialogue, where the author talks rather than the dramatis personae. There is a genial warmth of feeling in the book, and wide human sympathies, but with a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... his style and his quotations he shows his predilection for the classics, especially for Plutarch's "Lives." He also read much of the literature of the French Revolution. He was a very impressive orator; his addresses and proclamations show much emphasis, and the rhetorical artifice is apparent, as it is in all literature of this kind. In his letters he uses a very simple and naturally witty style. He was a great coiner of sentences, many of which can be found in his ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... nearly half a century. According to his biographer's account, Calderon wrote more than a hundred and twenty plays, more than a hundred spiritual allegorical acts (Autos), a hundred merry interludes or Saynetes [Footnote: This account is perhaps somewhat rhetorical. The most complete, and in every respect the best edition of the plays, that of Apontes, contains only a hundred and eight pieces. At the request of a great Lord, Calderon, shortly before his death, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... brought against you by legal evidence, not a mere rhetorical appeal, Sir William Wallace," added the regent, "else the sentence of the law must be passed on so tacit an acknowledgment ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... stronghold less easy to carry than the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never did Father of the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the Duchess. Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than by her voice. She used no preacher's commonplaces, no rhetorical amplifications. No. She had a "pulpit-tremor" of her own. To Armand's most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression. She stopped his mouth with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear another word; if she did, she ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... sweeping between the buildings,—and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs through ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... and the bombardment of Tripoli are much too fine a subject for rhetorical pyrotechnics to have escaped lecturers and orators of the Fourth-of-July school. We have all heard, time and again, how Preble, Decatur, Trippe, and Somers cannonaded, sabred, and blew up these pirates. We have seen, in perorations glowing with pink fire, the Genius of America, in full ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... to Newton's dynamic definition, that acceleration defies the ratio of force to inertia, is made obvious by the amusement with which a trick in apparent defiance of this principle is greeted. Informality of discussion in such experiments, questions on the part of the instructor that are more than rhetorical, and volunteer answers and comment from the class increase the vividness of the impressions. A mechanical adaptation of the "monkey on the string" problem, using little electric hoists or clockworks, introduces interesting discussion ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... fame rests principally upon Boswell, and that "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced." As to Coleridge himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their exaltation of his genius. Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge's to which he listened: "The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than another fell from his tongue.... As I retired homeward I thought ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of it in Grenada about the period above mentioned disclosed, thinly draped with rhetorical flowers, the dark outlines of a scheme to thwart political aspiration in the Antilles. That project is sought to be realized by deterring the home authorities from granting an elective local legislature, however restricted in character, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... astonishingly numerous. Beside those already mentioned there have come down to us two books on the life and philosophy of Plato,[3] a highly rhetorical treatise on the 'Demon of Socrates', and a free translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise 'on the Universe', though Apuleius is regrettably far from making due acknowledgement of his debt to the original. None of these works can be described ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Chief, etc. Note here, as often, the simile put BEFORE that which it illustrates,—an effective rhetorical, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... "In the rhetorical actions of the hand, the happy medium ought to be observed; for the action of the hand should be full of dignity and magnanimous resolution, making it a liberal index of the mind." A French writer admirably ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... in the community, then even British criticism assailed it. At the close of 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a bitter arraignment of the newer tendencies and a rhetorical panegyric of conservatism. Although Burke's sensational work was speedily and logically answered by several forceful thinkers, including the brilliant Thomas Paine, nevertheless it long held its place as the classical expression of official Britain's horror of social equality and of "mob violence." ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... words that Bakounine concludes his principal work "Statism and Anarchy" (Russian). We leave our readers to appreciate the rhetorical beauties of this passage. For our own part we shall be content with saying that it contains absolutely no human ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... law is its squarely facing the conditions of actual life, and its absence from nonsense or nauseating sentimentality. Were our present churches to observe more of this plain talk, for which the good old Anglo-Saxon is as fully expressive and convincing as the old Hebrew, and deal less in rhetorical flourishes and figurative mean-nothings to tickle the ears of our modern Pharisees, mankind as well as womankind would be infinitely so much the better off, mentally, morally, and physically, and there would be less of the conflict between science and ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in it, not the old placid escape from life, but a new stimulation to arduous and ardent living. And out of the ruck of authors, eager, exigent, and the tremendous clash of nations, new and old, there finally emerged a prose based not upon rhetorical reminiscences, but responsive minutely to the necessities of the national life. The oratorical platitudes of Castelar and Canovas del Castillo gave way to the discreet analyses of Azorin (Jose Martinez Ruiz) and Jose Ortega y Gasset, to the sober sentences of the Rector of the University ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... entirely, we must mention two more characteristics of Lyly's prose which are very noticeable, but which come under the head of ornamental, rather than constructional, devices. The first of these is a peculiar use of the rhetorical interrogation. Lyly makes use of it when he wishes to portray his characters in distress or excitement, and it most frequently occurs in soliloquies. Sometimes we find a string of these interrogations, at others they are answered by sentences beginning "ay but," and occasionally ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... religion, the explanation of the laws, and the situations of magistrates, were the privilege of the nobles. He thus laid the foundation of a free, though aristocratic constitution—according to Aristotle, the first who surrendered the absolute sway of royalty, and receiving from the rhetorical Isocrates the praise that it was a contest which should give most, the people of power, or the king of freedom. As an extensive population was necessary to a powerful state, so Theseus invited to Athens all strangers willing to share in the benefits of its protection, granting them ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... are not formed by this method, yet words are intoned for certain purposes, chiefly rhetorical. We use the rising intonation (or inflection, as it is usually called) to indicate that a question is asked, and various effects are given to speech by the various intonations of rhetoric. But this process is used in other languages to form new words with which to express new ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... author of Lyrics of the Heart never heard of rhetorical figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only hyper-critic. Charles Fox, who admired The Traveller, thought Olivia's famous song in the Vicar "foolish," and added that "folly" was a bad rhyme to "melancholy."[3] He must ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... all the more vigorous perhaps from the limitation of mind and language under which the speaker laboured. Yet, fool that he had been made by the candidate, there was nothing acrid in his attack. Genuine flashes of rhetorical fire were occasionally struck by that plain and simple man, who knew what straightforward conduct was, and who did not know the illimitable caprice of ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... head-quarters of Varus, which seem to have been near the centre of the modern country of Westphalia, where the Roman general conducted himself with all the arrogant security of the governor of a perfectly submissive province. There Varus gratified at once his vanity, his rhetorical tastes, and his avarice, by holding courts, to which he summoned the Germans for the settlement of all their disputes, while a bar of Roman advocates attended to argue the cases before the tribunal of Varus, who did not omit the opportunity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... from exhaustion, some of broken necks from falling over their own feet, and some from lack of restoratives. The mice, he avers, enjoyed the pleasures of the chase with composure. But if "Roman history is nine-tenths lying," we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that rhetorical figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible cruelty to a lovely women; for a hard ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... "Microcosm" of Ibn Zaddik is the first compendium of science, philosophy and theology in Jewish literature. And yet it is a small book; for Ibn Zaddik does not enter into lengthy discussions, nor does he adorn his style with rhetorical flourishes or copious quotations from Bible and Talmud. The "Olam Katon" is clearly meant for beginners, who require a summary and compendious view of so much of physics, psychology, metaphysics and ethics as will ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... important, influential and popular writers of that day were perhaps Anthony Collins and the Earl of Shaftsbury. These were both men of fortune, of polished education, and of great rhetorical and argumentative skill. Their influence over young minds was greatly increased by the courtesy and candor which pervaded all their writings. They ever wrote like gentlemen addressing gentlemen; and the views they urged were presented with the modesty of men who were ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and feathers. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... because it "points a moral and adorns a 'tail.'" The French always give this extra touch. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetorical tips and the sting there is in them? What French writer ever goaded his adversary with the belly of his lash, like the Germans and the English, when he could blister him with its silken end, and the percussion of wit be ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the organizers announced it as laws given to them by their divine progenitor, the great Mana. They added passages, moreover, which assert the divine claims of Brahmans and the inferiority of the rest of mankind. Such assertions are little more than rhetorical flourishes, for Brahmans never were either so omnipotent or so unamiable as the Code would represent them; nor were the Sudras ever so degraded. In Sanskrit plays and poems, weak and indigent Brahmans are by no means unfrequent; and, on the other hand, we meet with ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... the Peruvian port of Mollendo to the Bolivian interior, which the writer made in the year stated, are here transcribed. No rhetorical merit is claimed, facts only are related, and the compiler of the manuscript only hopes that his efforts may, in part at least, justify a cursory perusal, without exhausting the patience of the readers, ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various |
